De Blasio’s being terribly un-fare: His stance on farebeating arrests isn't progressive at all

By Robert Gangi

Feb 23, 2018 | 5:00 AM

Vance and de Blasio at odds (Joe Marino/New York Daily News)

A key problem with government policymaking is the use of police, prisons and the criminal justice system to address social and economic issues better handled by other programs and services.

Office holders across the political spectrum, including not only well-known hardliners like former Mayor Rudy Giuliani, but also so-called progressives like current Mayor de Blasio, have turned a system meant to be reactive — to administer justice in response to criminal incidents — into a means to contain or control a problem.

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The result is a justice system made dysfunctional by the unreasonable demands placed on it: overburdened court dockets, crowded prisons, thousands of mentally ill people confined in jails and officers making bogus or unnecessary arrests that incur the community's anger and distrust.

Meantime, this heavy-handed government approach to problems often ends up inflicting hurt and hardship on vulnerable populations like homeless people, drug-addicted individuals, and persons in psychiatric crisis. All often end up in prison, subject to inhumane conditions of confinement.

We're reckoning with this problem again in light of the rolling debate about whether or not to treat fare evasion as a crime.

The issue flared across the public consciousness this month because of a public dispute between Mayor de Blasio and Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance. The former objected to the latter's announcement that his office will decline to prosecute most defendants charged with farebeating; only those who constitute a public safety threat will get put through the criminal-justice ringer, while the rest will get ticketed.

The mayor fears that Vance's plan, though modest in its specifics and still permitting some fare evasion prosecutions, will lead to chaos on the subways, with some people paying the fare and others avoiding it.

To bolster his case, despite research by the Community Service Society showing that most turnstile jumpers are too poor to afford the fare, de Blasio has disputed the suggestion that poverty is the primary factor causing New Yorkers' attempts to bypass the fare.

There's "no evidence to my mind" that fare-beating is a crime of poverty, says the mayor. "We see people who evade fares and have money, and we see people evade fares and don't have money."

And so, de Blasio — who offers himself as the most progressive mayor in city history, and a cheerleader for kinder, gentler community policing — wants to preserve New York's ongoing punitive approach to the problem, namely to have NYPD officers continue to arrest, and issue summonses to, fare evaders even when Manhattan's top prosecutor has deemed them no public threat.

Last year, for example, the NYPD made nearly 20,000 arrests for fare evasion, making it the third most common city arrest, an average of 52 per day, 91% involving people of color.

Here are two stories emblematic of those dubious police actions, the first an account by a public defender about a recent client.

A man and his 9-year-old daughter who he was taking to school entered a Brooklyn subway station. He accidentally swiped her school-pass MetroCard and the girl swiped his.

Police arrested the man in front of his frightened daughter, charging him with theft of services for using his child's card.

In another case — a representative of PROP, the agency I lead, spoke to the defendant right after his arraignment — a man entering the subway at 116th St. and Lexington Ave. in Harlem helped a handicapped man with a walker to make it down the steps.

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The man swiped himself in and turned to notice that the handicapped man was having trouble getting the walker over the turnstile. The man then opened the emergency door to let his fellow New Yorker enter the platform — leading the police to arrest the good samaritan for fare evasion.

Alternative measures, effective and more benign, are available. They involve providing a reduced or free fare for low-income New Yorkers and posting service workers by subway turnstiles whose purpose is to aid people to use the train, rather having cops hide outside the sightlines of people at the turnstile.

Yet while a growing movement backs reduced fares for the poor, the Fair Fares Campaign, de Blasio has repeatedly refused to add any funding to the city budget to make it happen.

So, let's be honest: In this very important matter, de Blasio has forfeited the mantle of progressivism. Denying ample evidence that farebeating and poverty are linked, he is choosing to send poor people through the justice system, and to jail, rather than help them get around the city freely.